Political theory and practice

1824 The Presidential election went to the House of Representatives which voted for John Quincy Adams, though Andrew Jackson had more popular votes. There were two other candidates. Curiously both Adams and Jackson had the same Vice Presidential running mate, John Calhoun. Jackson had campaigned vigorously on the program of the corruption of Congress, only to discover he had no friends there.

1917 Father Flanagan founded Boys Town in Omaha. Quite a story. Seen Spencer Tracey do it. Been there more than once.

1955 In Montgomery, Alabama Rosa Parks was jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws. In those angry, volatile, and murderous times she had volunteered to be a test case for the NAACP.

1987 Under great pressure from the Fitzgerald corruption investigation Country Party Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen resigned as Queensland’s longest-serving Premier (1967-1987). He freely manipulated electoral boundaries to weight sparsely populated country seats. Recalling his garbled speech reminds me of President Tiny.

1990 Shortly after 11 am, hand-held drills penetrated the last rock wall and to connect the Chunnel linking Great Britain with the European mainland for the first time in 8,000 years. It took four more years to bring the it into service. Been through it a couple of times. Napoleon had an engineering assessment of such a tunnel in 1804. It was assumed in ‘The Trans-Atlantic Tunnel’ (1935) discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1016 Cnut the Great (Canute), King of Denmark, took the English throne. Notice the Ecco shoes as he explains climate change to retainers.

1876 Archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann found the gold mask of Agamemnon. We saw it in Athens and also visited his house.

1886 First commercially successful AC electric power plant opened, Buffalo, NY

1906 Republican President Theodore Roosevelt at the bully pulpit denounced segregation of Japanese school children in San Francisco.

1924 First radio transmission of photographs from London to New York using the work of Canadian inventor William Stephenson from University of Manitoba. Facsimile forerunner.

1803 The Louisiana Purchase agreement was signed. It included all of six states: Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and parts of eight more: Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana. Nearly doubling the area of the country. The purchase was opposed by some Senators and Representatives whose names are now forgotten.

1935 Physicist Erwin published his famous thought experiment ‘Schrödinger’s cat’, a paradox that illustrated the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. To observe is to alter.

1948 The first mass-produced Australian car, the Holden FX, rolled off the assembly line in Melbourne. The automobile industry has been a child of the tariff wall and thereafter a political football.

1949 Chang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist regime left mainland China for Taiwan and stayed. Kate’s mother once sold a pup to Madame Chang. True fact.

1972 Atari released Pong, the first commercially successful video game. More came.

1520 Ferdinand Magellan passed through the Tierra del Fuego to become the first European to enter the Pacific from the Atlantic. He had left Spain on 20 September. In the image below the Pacific Ocean is on the left and the Atlantic on the right.

1660 The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge had its first meeting. Sir Christopher Wren, who was Gresham’s Professor of Astronomy gave the lecture. The audience was the scientific cream of Great Britain. The Royal warrant came two years later.

1814 ‘The Times of London’ was first printed by automatic, steam powered presses which reduced the price per number, making newspapers available to a mass audience.

1919 Lady Astor is elected the first woman in Parliament. She campaigned hard as a Conservative and was re-elected until 1945. She held the ethnic and racial prejudices of the time and place.

1956 Government of Canada paid the transportation costs to settle 37,565 Hungarian refugees in Canada, including the child pictured below. There followed English lessons and a clothing allowance.

1095 Pope Urban II called the First Crusade because “Deus vult!” (“God wills it!”) to liberate the Holy Land from the infidels. He was responding to false Fox News from Jerusalem about massacres of Christians. The aggression was Christian and battles have since continued.

1868 George Custer led a massacre of peaceful Cheyennes on the Washita River in Oklahoma. He had been suspended from duty for a year because of absence, carelessness, neglect, and incompetence. He made no effort to identify the Indians, respond to the white flag they showed, or the presence of numerous women and children. All were murdered at Custer’s command, though some troopers of the 7th Cavalry refused to participate, and Custer attempted to silence and punish them. Custer’s wife ensured it was reported as a great victory against the odds on the fact-free Fox News of the day. Pictured are some of Custer’s victims.

1895 Alfred Nobel made his last will and testament, pledging his enormous wealth toward the betterment of humanity through Nobel prizes.

1999 Labour Party leader Helen Clark became first women elected Prime Minister of New Zealand.

2006 Led by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Clark, the Canadian House of Commons passed a resolution recognising Quebecois as a nation with a united Canada by a vote of 265 to 16. It seems largely symbolic, e.g., public parks in Quebec were re-named as nationale parcs rather than provincial parks. Quebec also got its own trade commissioners in French-speaking countries like Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Cote d’ivoire. In context it took the air out of a proposal for yet another sovereignty referendum in Quebec. How that sold in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia among Acadians and elsewhere among Franco-Canadiens would be question.

43 BC In the wake of Julius Caesar’s murder Octavian, Lepidus, and Antony form a triumvirate to rule Rome and its Empire. Ah huh. It lasted even shorter time than the first triumvirate.

1896 Alonzo Stagg’s University of Chicago football team went into a huddle before offensive plays. Other teams followed the example within days. The word ‘huddle’ came from Low German to Middle English and refers to animals and people crowding together against the weather.

1917 On the orders of Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes army officers raided the Queensland Government Printing Office in Brisbane and seized all copies of Hansard containing a speech by the Premier of Queensland, T. J. Ryan, against military conscription for the Great War in Europe. This was done just before the second referendum on conscription. Earlier newspaper censorship in Brisbane had kept Ryan’s speech from a public airing. So much for states’ rights.

1917 Five professional hockey teams in Canada signed an agreement to create the National Hockey League. One ambition was to raise civilian morale with diversion from the long lists of the dead, wounded, and missing from the Western Front.

1941 FDR signed a bill making the fourth Thursday in November Thanksgiving day. Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed that in 1863, but there was no legislation. Rather each year the president proclaimed the last Thursday of November to be Thanksgiving Day. In 1939 that last Thursday was 30 November. The retail association claimed that such a late Thanksgiving eroded sales for Christmas and urged that it be pushed forward. The result was Franksgiving on the third Thursday in 1939 and in 1940. This change led to much confusion, contention, and distraction and became a political football. FDR reversed course and accepted the convention of the fourth Thursday with his usual wit and grace.